by Brian Bamford
A FEW days ago someone put a thread on the anarchist website libcom* entitled 'The Orwell quotes right-wingers never mention'. It tries to show the breadth of George Orwell's ideas goes beyond his books '1984' and 'Animal Farm', in so far as they are perceived as attacks on state socialism and revolution. The thread correctly attempts to show that Orwell was in fact a socialist who participated in a revolution in Spain. There is a mountain of evidence that demonstrates this in his essays and letters, not to mention his book 'Homage to Catalonia', which Noam Chomsky describes as his best book.In an essay reviewing Charles Dickens book Tale of Two Cities on the French revolution, Orwell chastises him for his exaggerations:
'The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.'
Now the approach of the libcom thread is sound in that it tries to stress the authentic Orwell, who clearly favoured a form of socialism, and who sides with the working class based on his experiences in Spain.
Sitting in the trenches in Aragon in 1937 at the time of what some call the Spanish Revolution, Orwell wrote:
'...those first three or four months that I spent in the line...formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.
'... I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the the mental atmosphere was one of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone one as his master; ' (Homage to Catalonia; pages 101 and 102 of the Penguin edition)
It seems to me that Orwell's time on the Aragon front brought about a transformation in his thinking that led to him shifting to a belief in the possibility of socialism. And yet, equally it established in his mind a mental state which also blended with what he had to say in his own critique of Dickens when describes him thus: ' [as] the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.'
Those who despise Orwell today would have us drop this liberal aspect of both Orwell and Dickens, and have us embrace a form of modern totalitarianism which seeks to stiffle what Orwell calls the free intelligence of the old fashioned 19th century liberal.
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